[quote]Egon - I checked out your globe (very pretty). I was getting ~18 fps on my machine. How does that scale with increasing window size? If you displayed the same globe in a window twice as wide & high, would the fps drop by 4x? A while ago I was doing some pixel plotting for a voxel engine. It was fine when I had a small window (300x200), but once I got to a size usable for a game, it ran terribly slow. (or slowly, one or the other)
[/quote]
It depends (like in any other 3D application). As long as you are fillrate limited (and you are most likely fillrate limited when using jPCT in software mode), the drop in framerate will be quite noticable when enlarging the window. Maybe not the 4x you mentioned, but close to that (3x maybe…). But there nothing you can do about it…the more pixels to fill, the slower it goes… 
18fps is quite low…what kind machine is that? A P3-600 or similar?
its just my cheap work laptop. its something like 800mhz. i tried it at home and got much better results.
Ok, major help needed here!
I created an application that tests the speed of the drawImage() instruction, ie:
Graphics g = surface.getGraphics();
g.drawImage(doubleBuffer);
The speed with an empty scene without framerate limiter was 300fps at 640x48, but at 1600x1200 just 35-40!
I will go with the MemoryImageSource as you guys suggested in this thread, but will it solve this problem;
ie is it possible to copy the contents of the Image created from the 2d array into a surface without using g.drawImage()?
I have never used MemoryImageSource before but must master it in order to implement Z Buffer. Oh well :I